In Pieces

Tabitha Carless-Frost

A PORTRAIT WITH BLURRED EDGES

Some of the first photographs I see of my grandmother are tiny; black & white squares whose white borders coax the images into something resembling vintage television sets. In one, she stands next to my grandfather outside a run-down cottage. In another, she leans out of a net-curtained window, the sun bleaching her features to whiteout. In another, she poses next to an angular white car, her hair beehived & perfect. In another, she is alone on a sun lounger, arms folded across her body, as if anticipating attack. 

I notice that she always seems to be looking in the same direction – head tilted slightly down, her eyes looking up to the left. It is as if someone is shining a bright light into her face with the camera & she is having to squint. Even on a dull day indoors, she cannot face the examining lens face on, & instead has to look at the camera indirectly in order to withstand the process. The effect on her face is such that the interplay of shadow & light transforms her features, carving out a fierce jawline & round apples for her cheeks, accentuating the thin taper of her chin & nose into a strange new sharpness. Maybe this was her intention; to draw the eye’s attention to her edges, to make herself appear as outline rather than flesh. 

Apart from her distant gaze, I see no real evidence of her illness, no obvious sign in any of these images that could be read as an omen. But why would there be? Why would a family – especially one who never put a headstone on her grave – choose to document a relative’s darkest years, let alone hold on to those remembrances for posterity?

AFTER THE FACT

I have only seen photographs, have only heard stories, can only imagine because I do not know her. I only know the aftereffects: the ripples of shock & hurt which were sent out in ever-expanding rings that I can never really know the true magnitude of.

When I first ask my mother what my grandmother was like she recalls only two things outside of her depression: that she played the piano to concert pianist level, & that she gave it up for almost no reason at all. 

“Her illness made it hard to remember her, it sort of squashed out everything else.” My grandmother’s madness & suicide eclipsed everything that went before it, & she was mislaid in the turmoil somehow. 

What is it to be erased like that? A life cut short is sad enough, a section unlived or its future possibilities scrubbed out prematurely – but to be erased retroactively?

I do not feel the pain of her loss, but I miss the mother I would have had if she had not been as she was, if time had not unfolded its crumpled sheets in such a way.

LIKENESS

I often find myself looking for myself in her features, but we do not look alike. Quite apart from her being a whole eight inches shorter than me – I am told she was only four foot eleven when she died – if we were to stand shoulder to shoulder, I doubt anyone would think of us as looking discernibly related. 

I discover a photograph of my mother from the 80s, or rather, a photograph of a photograph – I can see the edge of the frame. In a void of studio white, she stands upright, one foot pointing forward, her hands on her hips in a pose that asks you to think vaguely of a ballerina. She wears a deep pink high-rise swimsuit, pink heels. Her hair is bleach blonde, the bad perm twisted into a pineapple up-do. Her lips & eyes, neatly made up. Her smile is neutral & benign. I nearly do not recognise her. 

My mother is still very beautiful, still paints her face with intricate blues & golds, still spends hours perfecting her blonde bob with straighteners – she is very beautiful, but I do not want to look like her. 

A family friend, watching us stroll ahead of her, once said “you both walk the same! Like little determined ducks!” I was a teenager at the time, & terminally self-conscious; having my body likened to a stout animal with wide, ungraceful feet did not land well. However, it was the likening of my mannerisms to my mother’s which I really could not stand. I found myself wanting to point to her & say look! – gesture to my jaw & the muscle which protrudes there a little more noticeably than when I was younger, & far more noticeably than hers. Look! I want to say with a barely suppressed delight, our faces are not the same! Though you are half of me, I am not all you! I want to list all the other ways we are not the same, write huge long list-based poems out of them, gather up evidence & made it a shield to hold up against the fear that whatever it is that haunts her, haunted her mother, the damage, curse, affliction, infection, whatever, might mistake me for some outsider & overlook me entirely, if only I can claim difference enough to trick its gaze. But then I think of my sister, who has always looked the spitting image of our mother – same fine hair, same blue eyes, same absurdly long eyelashes like a calf, same full lips & hazily defined cupids bow, both of them less able to tan than my father & I, but more likely to become covered in a thin dappling of lightly layered freckles, in the Irish way.

To look like & to be like are, in families, sometimes jumbled together. For a long time, I did not know the difference.

REPRESENTATION

I still marvel at photographs: the temporal collapse they offer, the petrification of a moment in time. How must Joseph Nicéphore Niépce felt in 1825 when he looked down at his silver chloride coated paper & realised that he had just taken the first ever photograph? That he had just imprinted the image of a being-in-the-world directly onto paper? Did he fear it or worship it? Did he think that of all his previous attempts – the dim negatives of 1816 which faded to nothing in sunlight, & his unpredictable bitumen-lavender-varnish solutions – were necessary failures which would have, in the end, always led him to success?

Though Niépce is credited as creating the world’s first permanent photographic image, his first pictures are really, in essence, photocopies. They were copies of engravings: a horse, a woman with a spinning wheel, Pope Pius VII. 

What representation am I trying to make here? A direct resemblance? Or a copy of an already subjective representation?

GHOST IN THE LENS

There is another image of her, again in black & white, on a beach this time, wearing a floral dress. The top of the steep cliff behind her is cut out of shot. Her left foot points forward, toes buried in the sand, & her hands are at her sides, elbows bent lightly as if she were caught between raising & relaxing them. Her expression is smiling, but hesitant, wary. She poses with the same downturned position of her head as before, the same uncertain look to the left, the same reluctance to meet the camera’s gaze. 

Yet it is the feature above her that I cannot tear my eyes from: a quirk of the film or the developing process maybe, or some stray sand in the camera lens? There is a dark shape, a twisting spiral, something like a hook or a gust of blackened wind hanging in the air. It snakes across the grainy planes of the image’s upper atmosphere. Its dark outline is diaphanous, folding the sky like silk. Its edges ill-defined, as if it had yet to coalesce into something more solid. It seems to shift before my eyes. 

The blurred shape makes me think of the spirit photography of the mid-nineteenth century: a jarring mix of naively obvious double-exposure images, where the translucent ghost of a dead relative looms behind the sitter’s shoulder, & the more unsettling light flare or trail that moves through the image while the sitter remains still & in focus. 

It was thought one could catch the soul of the departed on film, & why not? After the ascent of such avant-garde recording technologies – telegraphy, cinematography, radio, & gramophone – the world must have seemed suddenly teeming with ghosts: half-here-half-there people, disembodied voices, long dead persons re-animated on screen, messages inexplicably communicated across temporal & spatial boundaries. Everything was séance.

SHORT-SIGHTED

My mother is short sighted – as am I, but only slightly, in my right eye. When her optician first tried to fit her with contacts, he assessed her eyesight by asking her if this or that lens was better or worse, but she just kept replying with the same words: “I don’t know.” Slightly disgruntled, he concluded that her ability to discern differences in focus had been lost through her stubborn refusal to wear glasses. 

My mother had happily accepted the world as fuzzy for years. She says she prefers life without glasses, when everything is a lovely, vague kind of watercolour. Glasses gave everything a sudden sharpness, made it all pointed, each blade of grass individually serrated rather than blending together in a smooth wash of green.

In the late nineties, because of her work, she ended up having laser eye surgery; her cornea removed & the under layers reshaped so as to restore ‘normal’ eyesight. But she chose to only have one eye corrected – her left – so that she was forever left in a world of oscillating focus. Her vision remains myopic; she holds both the near & far in sight, while really holding neither.

LACKING IN DETAIL

I go to see my grandfather, to ask him questions & to look at more photographs. He shows me family trees, the saved receipts from his first wedding, his mother’s identity book. For a man of nearly 90, he impresses me with his ability to recall his ID number & army number. Then I ask him about my grandmother, ask what she was like before her illness.

My mother has told me snippets about her personality, but only when I ask. My mother tells me that, though she & my uncle (being only twelve & sixteen) did not attend their mother’s funeral, they did come to the wake after. She remembers that a few of her mother’s old classmates were there, reminiscing about their school days. They were laughing she said, talking about her mother with fondness, how she was “a hoot” & “very naughty,” that she was always reticent to the nuns who ran the school, & how on Ash Wednesday when the nuns would paint a charcoal cross on the girl’s foreheads, my grandmother would cajole the others to split away to the toilets to wash it off, only for the nuns to smear it back on, only for my grandmother to sneak away to erase it again. 

I am oddly looking forward to what my grandfather might tell me about her, if he has his own stories from when they were teenage sweethearts, but when I ask if she was funny or silly or cheeky or difficult, he replies simply – “no more than anyone else.”

“Was she a storyteller?”

   “No, not really.”

“Did she like to talk at parties or was she shy?”

“She wasn’t retiring,

 but she wouldn’t push herself forward.”

“What did she like to do?

Did she have any hobbies?”

“I’m not sure, love. 

I think she did a flower arranging course once.”

“What was she like then?”

“I don’t know.”

I feel cruel but also exasperated. This man who can recall long strings of digits, the name & date of all the family house moves, dates of holidays, new cars, & job changes, cannot answer questions about who his wife was, the qualitative detail of their life together, the little fragments that makes someone themselves.

There is a void at the heart of his memory, where all the “how it felt” or “why” is emptied out, lost, gone. She is a fugitive presence not only in her own archive, but in her own family.

ARCHIVE OF THE SELF

Everyone will, inadvertently, produce an archive of the self. A mixture of public records & private documents; the paper-trail collection of birth certificate, CVs, censuses, diaries, photo albums, birthday cards, & utility bills. Unlike my grandmother, I will leave a trail of “digital remains” when I die – social media accounts I will be unable to delete or manage, ghost-profiles that wear my face & leave a trail of blue hyper-links to webpages I have once interacted with. 

In isolation, these little fragments mean nothing much at all – like junkshop postcards, they are unintelligible fragments of someone else’s life, worthy of a glance & a smile, but nothing more. But in combination – as an archive – they suddenly slip into a quite different realm. Amongst the mixture of consciously chosen documentation & mad fragments that “just ended up there,” a story of a life emerges.

A well-documented life is often, in retrospect, thought of as a successful life – press-clippings, letters, cards, certificates, & framed photographs. But what if the archive suggests a quite different life? What if the archive is self-effacing – a shifting shimmer of half told story, incomplete medical records, & snatches of handwriting that changes depending on how you look?

BY YOUR HAND

I am at my parents’ house. It is late winter, & I cannot write. In the kitchen, my mother proffers me a book of poetry & looks at me, expectant. I put away my own book, folding the page over despite not having taken in more than a sentence in the last quarter hour & read her face instead, for how I should respond. She holds the book like an offering. An offering of what? 

I take it, raise my eyebrows in the way I have learnt; not too incredulous as to provoke defensiveness, but not too interested as to grant her hold over me. Despite myself, I am interested. 

My mother busies herself with something peripheral & so I allow myself to look: the book is green, old leather, or maybe card or cloth; it is so worn that I cannot quite tell. It pages feels warm.

“There,” she says, leaning over me to tap the inside cover page. “You’ll like that.” I shift, uncomfortable. It is there that I see the real heart of her gesture; a few sparse lines of my grandmother’s handwriting sit on the inside page, waiting.

My mother moves away from me, sits by the window, looks at her phone. 

I never met my grandmother, in life – she died when my mother was sixteen & my mother rarely, if ever, spoke of her. Yet she was a constant presence as my teenage obsession: part rebellion against my mother, part morbid fascination with the circumstances of her death. I did not then see how my obsession was just another way to try & achieve a closeness that I could not understand. To me, my grandmother is a kind of mythic figure – a silhouette in the window of a high tower, a distant character, features undefined. But when I look down at her hand now, I wonder if this a kind of introduction? 

Her hand is there above her husband’s, which is, in turn, above my mother’s – yet my grandmother’s words lean vertiginously up the page, where the others are ruler straight. Her inscription starts with a date – “C H R I S T MA S  1 9 7 4” – that she had helpfully noted in capitals. I smile because her ‘F’s look more like a loopy backwards ‘E’, like how I imagine Elizabeth the 1st wrote her Es, like a lock or a gate. I point out this curiosity to my mother & she almost smiles, but it falls quickly, as if it were a jump she had tried to clear but had fumbled during the run up. Instead, she nods & says dispassionately, “I always thought she put it on, you know. That she affected intricacies to make her writing look more ‘interesting’.” I flush, feel self-conscious, & then try not to because I recall my own childhood desire to have “interesting” writing: a fast cursive that suggested intellectualism, some undefined & undirected passion, even a little mystery in its illegibility – handwriting that was the equivalent of smoking a cigarette with an antique holder. A handwriting that is now, through repetition, instinctively my own.

Maybe there is some connection with the desire to write itself there, somewhere in that need. Maybe all writing is an effort to “affect intricacies,” using the careful curation of prosody to provoke affect, to conjure intricacy – intimacy even. I lean closer.

My grandfather’s hand is there too, just as I remember from the birthday cards of later childhood. His engineering background provides me with a host of metaphors with which to imagine him, all confirmed & reinforced by my knowledge of him in life; how much of his decision making has been led by a logic of damage assessment, of technical evaluations, & practical utility. His “y’s” are distinctly angular, as if drawn with a set square. But then I look again at the “y” in “my” & see instead a crooked arm, awkwardly held as if injured or broken, something inconveniently burdensome, the discomfort of which inevitably resurfaces again & again. 

I look away, feeling self-conscious for him, for myself, overtly aware that my grandfather is still alive. Despite the uncomfortable mix of love & cowardice I feel in analysing my grandmother’s hand, I can bear it better than looking at his. My mother shifts in her chair & I look back at my grandmother’s lettering. I want so badly to trace it with my own, but I don’t. 

I notice the pressure of her hand is irregular, near disappearing the “u” of “much” & robbing the “s” in “best” of its upper semicircle. In an incongruous sudden flare, the “T” of “best” is capitalised randomly so that is looks like “besT” – that lone letter is scorched, strong & dark, the pen pressed deep into the flesh of the page where the others are coaxed out quietly. I can’t help but see the first letter of my own name in it.

My grandmother’s letters are generally unconnected, well no, there are a few points of connection – the “m” & the “y” in mummy & “o” & the “r” in “for” – but they look retroactive, as if she had written it with each letter standing alone, disconnected, & then gone back over it & added connection where there was none, as if she were scared to write the letters naturally disparate, intuitively estranged from one another. Was she so terrified of her own inscribing instincts? Was she scared that someone might say there was no ease to her hand, no confidence, no flow? Did she worry that her sentences were made up of pieces, where others wrote things whole?

I worry again about my own hand, its tendency to lean to the right & then sometimes, randomly, erratically to the left. As a teenager, I had read on the internet that handwriting which alternates direction ultimately denotes madness & instability in the writer. I have sometimes found typing helps to smooth the edges of that fear. But only sometimes.

Her dedication says, “much admired” & “best beloved” – “admired” strikes me as a strange choice of word for a mother to gift to a daughter. Admire – from the Latin mīror, “to wonder,” “look upon,” or “contemplate.” Despite its officially established roots, I cannot entirely separate the word’s meaning from its second syllable’s homonym – mire, literally as in “bog” or “marshland,” & in a figurative sense, to be involved in “an intractable situation which is difficult to extricate oneself from.”

I feel my mother’s eyes shift towards me, but I don’t look up.

Even though my attempts to know my grandmother are based upon a discredited system of analysis, I cannot help but be seduced by it. It feels like scrying or divination. I look for signs, clues, little overlooked intricacies which feel as if, if I puzzle them right, might fix the past in a different light. This extrapolation of meaning from fragments, from notes, is, after all, my only way to know her. So, I spin a biography of familial relations through the loom of graphology, darning over the holes with writing & conjecture.

The word text has its roots in the Latin textus, literally meaning “a thing woven.” from the Proto-Indo European teks- “to weave, braid, fit together, to fabricate.” I think of Hélène Cixous, how she writes of the suppressed female voice which now speaks in a borrowed language, how she champions those very disruptions in the text which have disfigured my family’s tapestry – the gaps & silences, the incomprehensible & inconsistent. She tells me, her voice soft on the page, to write in white ink, to write with that pre-linguistic & unconscious potentiality which originates from the mother in the mother-child relation, before the child acquires male-centred verbal language.

But what if I can’t? What if the mother-child relation is disrupted – mired – back when mother was daughter & daughter was yet unmade? What if potentiality is not enough?

But then my grandmother uses a nickname, a pet name for my mother which I have never heard her say, admit, or use, & it makes me want to pull my insides out through my chest & howl & cry because the tenderness that is there is so clear & so delicate & to know that within three short years it would be replaced by what now exists now, between us all, is the saddest story that I do not know. 

My grandmother signs the inscription-come-dedication “from Mummy B x” as if my mother had another mother that she might mix her up with.

PLACE HOLDER

There is no flow to what I know of her, no page-turning sense or feed-scroll ability. What I know of her I have concocted from fragments: isolated references from my mother here & there; a scattering of photographs; a watch too small for any of us to wear; a diary, its pages empty.

My grandmother is a cluster of remnants & blank space, a shuffle-able collection of frames which means that, to me, who never knew her, she is so much less & so much more than the person I never met. 

But maybe it isn’t her. Maybe it is the space she occupies, the space she holds which I am drawn to. Maybe she is a stand in, a symbolic figure for the long line of unknown female ancestry, names which have always been doomed to fade because they have gone unwritten. Last names, first names, maiden names & all the details of their stories: erased. There are many presences like hers, & they are not always neatly registered amongst the dead.

Maybe this is all about legibility, who writes it & who reads it & in what order. Because an archive is never really a portrait of its object, but of its archivist.